Off-the-Shelf Chips Conquer The Heights of Computing

摘要

It's been a rocky year for the supercomputer industry. Late last summer Thinking Machines Corp., the company that pioneered the use of massively parallel computers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In December another leader in the massively parallelfield, Kendall Square Research, followed suit. And in March Seymour Cray, the father of much of today's supercomputer industry, announced that his latest progeny, Cray Computer Corp., was also bankrupt. (His first company, Cray Research, remains in business.) The series of failures led many in the media and elsewhere to speak of the decline-or even the coming demise-of the entire industry.